A brochure of International Publication No. 2006/013896 (patent document 1), Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 110953/2008 (patent document 2), and a brochure of International Publication No. 2007/088978 (patent document 3) disclose that 6-aryloxyquinoline derivatives are compounds useful as agricultural and horticultural insecticides or agricultural and horticultural fungicides. These 6-aryloxyquinoline derivatives are compounds having high insecticidal activity against Lepidoptera, Hemiptera, Coleoptera, Acari, Hymenoptera, Orthoptera, Diptera, Order Thysanoptera, and plant parasitic nematodes.
Further, these 6-aryloxyquinoline derivatives are also effective as agricultural and horticultural fungicides against a variety of plant pathogenic fungi and are known as compounds having fungicidal effect, for example, against Sphaerotheca fuliginea, Puccinia recondita, Erysiphe graminis, Alternaria solani, Venturia inaequalis, Monilinia fructicola, and Colletotrichum fragariae. 
The above documents disclose a process for producing a 6-aryloxyquinoline derivative in which a 4-aryloxyaniline derivative is reacted with a β-ketocarboxylic acid ester and a 6-aryloxyquinoline derivative is produced through a 6-aryloxyquinolone derivative. In this process, however, the yield in the cyclization reaction is low to medium. When the production of a derivative obtained by introducing a substituent into any one of the 5- and 7-positions of the quinoline derivative is contemplated, a mixture of a 5-position substitution product with a 7-position substitution product is obtained leading to a further lowering in yield of the contemplated compound and, at the same time, a complicated separation step of separating position isomers by column chromatography or the like is necessary. Accordingly, a process for producing a 6-aryloxyquinoline derivative, which can produce the 6-aryloxyquinoline derivative found as useful as insecticidal compounds and fungicidal compounds at a yield high enough to apply the process to the production of the 6-aryloxyquinoline derivative on a commercial scale, has been demanded.